Gaming & Culture —

Sony tries to boost PS3 development with dev kit price cut

In an ironic bid to attract more development to the PS3—the most costly …

In an effort to increase development for PlayStation 3, Sony today lowered the cost of its PS3 development kit to $2,000, the second price cut the company has made since demo units began shipping to developers in 2005.

"Having the same form factor as the commercially available PS3, the new Reference Tool models allow advanced game programming and more efficient computer graphics rendering," the company said via press release. "With its more affordable pricing, this new model will appeal to a broader range of developers and publishers, and will help to provide a more streamlined game development environment, further accelerating game development for PS3."

What's more, Sony promised enhanced technical support for developers, an optimized PS3 compiler (SNC PPU) to improve efficiency, and better documentation for PhyreEngine, the company's free-to-use graphics engine that supports both OpenGL and Direct3D. In general, the announcement featured a lot of verbal commitment from Sony on behalf of developers.

"With more and more new and exciting PS3 titles scheduled for release this year from third party developers and publishers as well as from SCE Worldwide Studios," the company added, "SCE will deploy various measures to further reinforce game development for PS3 and will continue to expand the platform to offer attractive interactive entertainment experiences only available on PS3."

The news comes as "Surviving the Recession" and "Stability in the Stormy Weather" are a key themes of this year's Game Developers Conference. With today's announcement, it's an issue Sony is obviously aware of. But it's ironic to see a "lower-cost" development initiative being promoted for the PlayStation 3—which at $400, remains the most expensive console on the market.

As a result and despite solid games, PS3 sales have declined for four consecutive months now over the same period last year—a sobering trend publishers and developers have surely noticed. Perhaps incessant calls to lower the console's price will be the only solution to reverse declining demand.

Sony was not immediately available when contacted by Ars on Monday for further comment.

I'd love to see a Wii developer, 360 developer & PS3 developer side by side. The PS3 fellow has to etch 1's and 0's into a drive with a stick, the 360 guy writes a bit of code and compiles it while the guy with the Wii basically drags and drops fun into his game.Using my example (which is obviously based firmly in fact and cannot be disputed), one can imagine that the PS3 development process won't really become any more attractive because they knocked a dollar or two off the dev kit.

Originally posted by benjwah:I'd love to see a Wii developer, 360 developer & PS3 developer side by side. The PS3 fellow has to etch 1's and 0's into a drive with a stick, the 360 guy writes a bit of code and compiles it while the guy with the Wii basically drags and drops fun into his game.Using my example (which is obviously based firmly in fact and cannot be disputed), one can imagine that the PS3 development process won't really become any more attractive because they knocked a dollar or two off the dev kit.

I think you'll find the Wii developer is using a Shovel to drop his 'fun' into the game. Even Nintendo are doing it with their gamecube ports.

Well ... the sarcasm drips around here. I personally would like to have a copy of the dev kit, and if I had one might write some "simple" games for it.

(In case folks on this thread don't recognize my nick ... I'm a long time high-speed code junkie, altivec junkie, and now Cell code junkie ... but the Cell code I currently write is under Linux, and for the supercomputing cells.)

One of the attractions of the xbox360 is that there is a low-cost "amateur" dev environment available and there are some fun games (not complex 3D shooters with long story lines ... but fun to play games) which come out of that.

Linux is available "for free" on the PS3 and that's nice, but Sony did an ultra-draconian knife-the-baby job on that Linux as far as rendering is concerned. One of the SPEs on the Sony Cell is the "security engine" and under Linux all software is COMPLETELY locked out of the GPU, and the only way anything gets written to the screen is that you prepare a bitmap and tell the security SPE to copy it over. Aside from being mighty damn vexing, it wastes memory because that bitmap (which is in effect double buffered) comes from the main memory ... and that's not overly generous in a PS3.

The Linux rendering pretty much runs like ass on PS3, and it's a ton of work and pretty limited to port anything graphical to the PS3 under linux.

If sony would even just open up the path to the GPU a little bit, that would be a nice thing to do. That and some sort of "amateur game dev kit" would go a long way toward building some good will outside the narrow confines of their commercial developers.

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Another of the rather bitter ironies is that the IBM dev suite for Cell is built on "Eclipse" which is their big IDE, and ohhh yeecch mama save me ... it's mostly written in Java and it is the biggest piece of bloatware on the face of the earth.

You want to see a grown developer cry? Try to dev on a PS3 under Linux, using Eclipse. (which you can do, run the Fedora Linux for PS3, and Eclipse will "run" With the limited main memory it thrashes the disk to death doing anything, and of course PPE's branch penalties and complete lack of OOOE and fairly narrow execution width just KILL it at running Java.

To use Eclipse comfortably you need the hottest Core2 you can afford and a minimum of 2 GB main memory.. so anybody doing real cell development cross compiles ... which IMO is pretty pathetic.

Eclipse is IMO a poor excuse of a real dev IDE (de gustibus non disputandum est of of course... I suppose IBM's java heads think it's spiffy ), and you can't really blame sony or cell for that ... but it just adds to the general unpleasantness.

"SCE will deploy various measures to further reinforce game development for PS3 and will continue to expand the platform to offer attractive interactive entertainment experiences only available on PS3."

Two years after the system is released? Shouldn't this have been the focus from the very beginning?

I guess the 'they will buy it, even if doesn't have games' is realized by Sony as an uneffective strategy. Get your shit together next time assholes, and don't treat us like mindless drones who will buy your overpriced $600 George Foreman grill.

As long as it's still profitable for developers to create a PS3 port, there's no reason to believe that the PS3 will die.

Ports will only please those who already have a PS3 or those who live and die by PS exclusives.

For everyone else, the PS3 will lose out to MS simply because it is 2x the price. If I were just some regular schlob who was looking to buy the latest Need for Speed, Rock band, or Madden, why would I ever buy the PS3 over 360?

The PS2 was accepted, despite its flaws, because every month there was a game that was pretty much only available on that system. That simply isn't happening this time around and Sony's getting killed at that pricepoint. I think given MS's reputation still for hardware issues, if the 360 and PS3 were the same price it would be a serious fight and the PS3 would probably be selling higher (Due to BR, more saturation of 360s, and hardware reliability). Probably not a ton higher, but Sony has really only outsold MS 4 months ever I think.. not too good for them.

If you have been around here for a long time (like I have), then you will recognise BadAndy's name and associate it with performance cpu posts and programming.. especially for the PPC G4 days. High quality tech info to be blunt.

in other words, his reputation speaks for itself so when I see a BadAndy post, I tend to read them.. When I see a Mauller post... well Im sorry but my friend, you dont erm.. have a reputation for anything yet.

Originally posted by benjwah:I'd love to see a Wii developer, 360 developer & PS3 developer side by side. The PS3 fellow has to etch 1's and 0's into a drive with a stick, the 360 guy writes a bit of code and compiles it while the guy with the Wii basically drags and drops fun into his game.Using my example (which is obviously based firmly in fact and cannot be disputed), one can imagine that the PS3 development process won't really become any more attractive because they knocked a dollar or two off the dev kit.

I think you'll find the Wii developer is using a Shovel to drop his 'fun' into the game. Even Nintendo are doing it with their gamecube ports.

Yes, but at least their GameCube games were good to begin with! I wouldn't mind seeing a port of Twin Snakes, to be honest, especially with the Wii-Gun attachment!

I love Sony products and my PS3 but, how retarded are they!? I really want to go up to the big wiggs of Sony and kick them in the junk a few times. Cut the console price already!!!!!!!! I think everyone is asking them to cut the price! Do they sit around in thier offices all day and just think of ways to screw people over. Sure they make alot of money of the ps2 still BUT, eventually all those people are going to want the current gen system. Where are they going to go? Not the PS3 they will buy the Wii or the 360.

I love Sony products and my PS3 but, how retarded are they!? I really want to go up to the big wiggs of Sony and kick them in the junk a few times. Cut the console price already!!!!!!!! I think everyone is asking them to cut the price! Do they sit around in thier offices all day and just think of ways to screw people over. Sure they make alot of money of the ps2 still BUT, eventually all those people are going to want the current gen system. Where are they going to go? Not the PS3 they will buy the Wii or the 360.

I love Sony products and my PS3 but, how retarded are they!? I really want to go up to the big wiggs of Sony and kick them in the junk a few times. Cut the console price already!!!!!!!! I think everyone is asking them to cut the price!

Sony're really between a rock and a hard place on consumer hardware prices for the PS3. If they don't cut the console price, sales volumes are going to stay low. If they do cut the price they'll lose more money two ways (higher loss per console over more consoles).

If they've accepted that they're doomed to 3rd place in the console wars for this generation (which they are), probably the best path they've got is to rush out a "PS3.5" (i.e. a straightforward upgraded PS3 along the lines of GameCube -> Wii) branded as a PS4 in 2010 and go slow on hardware price cuts between now and then (say, a $50 cut this year and another $50 in 2010).

Originally posted by lensam69:Shouldn't the whole point be to give out the SDK for free?

Not if you thought you were dominant. Your entire strategy changes when you think you're on top.

At this point the strategy is obviously bad, but what other strategy do they have?

quote:

Make it as easy as possible for any developer, large or small, to crank out a ton of games for the Ps3. A few of those games will probably turn into must-have's.

That doesn't work for HD. An HD game takes several years, so it's way too late to start seeding developers now. That is why Apple's iPhone strategy is taking off. The devkit price was $99 for distribution, $599 for a Mac mini.

quote:

Bigger library can justify the purchase for many people, but we have to remember this is Sony we're talking about. If it's too rational, they probably won't do it.

It's not about rational, it's about strategy. They chose the wrong strategy.

I can't imagine they make any money off the SDK ... if you consider what it cost to develop and how many licenses there are ... no money in it.

I think the license fee is designed to do two things: recover some of the support costs (every significant developer will cost you suppport costs) and also serve as "serious money" to keep the wannabees out and to add some heft to NDAs (the legal force of which is substantially increased and associated penalties get bigger if you paid a substantial fee to gain access to the information).

When you look at it this way ... why drop it? For any serious commercial game studio the fee is piffling. In this context I wonder why they ARE dropping it and who the developers are they think they can draw in at 2 k$ license fee, and not higher?

The ONLY reason to drop it is to hope to entice some less "serious" game developers to do something for the PS3 ... and it's a good question whether that's worth Sony's time. It is ... if some of those games are actually attractive enough that it stimulates PS3 demand.

Xbox360 has benefitted from "casual games" and "casual game developers." How much they have really benefitted... I don't know, but it adds positive buzz, particularly in the gaming world, which is where console sales will come from (duh). But casual game developers won't pay 2k$ ... no way.

Strictly from my personal perspective I think that Sony has mismanaged its "public relations" here ... because hey, Sony HELPED (well, at least allowed) a Linux right from the get-go. Where's the Linux for Xbox360? (and if there was one, let me tell you a lot of folks would run it as a linux box because it's better suited to do that than Cell, and that may be why there isn't one )

Also, just a point of view, I happen to think Cell is a great piece of hardware, and a blast to program for ... and if you know what you are doing and are writing optimized numerical code ... it goes like a bat out of hell. If you know what you are doing you can get so many flops out of it on a bunch of "real world" numerical problems it's kinda scary.

But joe-average-programmer, particularly joe-average Java programmer, doesn't want to have anything to do with it.

The PPE (the "main" processor in Cell, and xbox360 just has 3 cores of PPE and none of the "synergistic processing elements" (SPEs) that Cell has) is piss-poor at branchy code and has no OOOe and if the kind of code you write does a lot of that, and particularly if it does a lot of pseudo-random accesses into large external memory spaces ... both these systems are dogs (but at least on xbox360 you have 6 threads of fully-symmetric MP with a coherent memory system, on Cell you have only two ... but then you have those SPEs if you know how to use them. If you can't use SPEs... Cell is a wasted piece of hardware to you.)

All across all the "enthusiast" threads there is endless partisan yada yada, in my view almost all of it is ill-informed and excessively partisan, slamming this or that with the usual flaming prose of the web.

Each of these systems represented an engineering tradeoff, and I can see arguments for each of them. And a lot of people confuse software problems with hardware problems. Folks should ask the "Bum Phillips" question ... he was the texas football coach who gained the praise "he can beat yourn with his'n, or he can beat his'n with yourn."

MS was first out the gate and had better dev software and better intermediate libraries. Is this a surprise? Anybody here expect Sony to beat MS at software? My bet is that if MS had chosen the Cell architecture and Sony had chosen xbox360s ... the tone of a great deal of the partisanship would be almost completely reversed.

There's been so much conflation of hardware/software/middleware issues, and so much no-content factoid bashing, from almost every direction.

I'd really like to see MS authorize a linux port for Xbox360 ... but I can understand why they don't ... they don't want to sell subsidized cheap linux boxes ... bad for business for them everyway you look at it.

(If you could get a bit more memory into the xbox chipset, it would make a great little transaction server, do a lot of things surprisingly well.)

I would really like to see Sony uncripple the graphics stack of Linux on Cell, but I sort-of understand why they won't ... similar reasons (except that for joe-average .. .the limited main ram, rather high latency (but high bandwidth) to that main ram, and only two threads of "CPU joe average has any clue how to use" make it a lot less attractive as a general purpose linux box. I think Sony does in fact have a lot less to fear on that front.

I think it would be cool if Sony would allow/create some sort of "dev lite" plan for the PS3 .. but if all it did was generate a ton of support demands from them and produced no usable games for the general public ... well you can see why they wouldn't want to.

@BadAndy - Is any of the Linux / Eclipse content that you wrote applicable to the actual PS3 devkit? I don't think anyone ever expected PS3 linux to be anything more than a toy to tinker with.

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That doesn't work for HD. An HD game takes several years, so it's way too late to start seeding developers now. That is why Apple's iPhone strategy is taking off. The devkit price was $99 for distribution, $599 for a Mac mini.

Why should a HD game take much longer to code than a SD game? Especially something as simple as a PSN $5 - $10 title?

How about redoing your DEVKITs so that they aren't total shit. Maybe even cut your losses and put out the PS4, with a devkit that doesn't have the gaming industry calling you a joke, and that these kits are total shit...yeah, this happened before the P$3 was ever released to the public.

Used to read articles at work about how horendous the P$3 dev kits where and the developing companies asking $ony to please fix it.

How about redoing your DEVKITs so that they aren't total shit. Maybe even cut your losses and put out the PS4, with a devkit that doesn't have the gaming industry calling you a joke, and that these kits are total shit...yeah, this happened before the P$3 was ever released to the public.

Used to read articles at work about how horendous the P$3 dev kits where and the developing companies asking $ony to please fix it.

@Stone because it's 3.5x the resolution of Standard definition. Dense geometry, 2k+ texture maps, shadow buffers, LOD, number of pixels to render out per frame, code that can push all that... I can think of a few reasons why HD development costs more money and takes more time.

Originally posted by Stone:@BadAndy - Is any of the Linux / Eclipse content that you wrote applicable to the actual PS3 devkit? I don't think anyone ever expected PS3 linux to be anything more than a toy to tinker with.

I have ZERO, repeat ZERO, experience or knowledge of Sony's dev kit. You need to pay the fee and sign the NDA's to obtain it and I have done neither.

The Linux dev is NOT "a toy" ... it's a really useful tool to a certain crowd of really geeky Cell programmers. But this crowd doesn't build games for PS3 ... it builds supercomputing codes for either the big supercomputing monsters which use Cell, or the many smaller Cell/cluster hybrids.

A PS3 running Linux is a really neat dev platform for that (if you look at what a cell blade from IBM costs ... you get the picture). If you have a local cell blade .. then great, run on the blade, but if you don't it's real nice to run on PS3.

There are also folks that actually run PS3 beowulf clusters! We put 32 of them together as a joke ... the interconnect latency is ... hmmm .... "nothing to write home about" but if you have a problem which doesn't involve a lot of node-to-node communication they are an amazingly cheap and fast solution. Of course Sony didn't build them for geeks like us.

(incidentally, you might not think of it as "gaming" but killer chess engines are one of the things you can do with Cell or a cluster of same ... Chess being an "embarrassingly parallel" algorithm the way most chess engines deal with it, and the SPEs are damn good because of their low-latency large private memories. Unless you have a dual-quad-core PC ... a single PS3 can look deeper/wider in a given time, running 8 threads of a PS3 (two PPE threads, 6 SPE threads, because one SPE is disabled in a PS3 cell, and one is the damned "security engine." )

I am actually puzzled by this announcement ... 2k$ seems like a funny price to me. The discount shouldn't matter to any of the serious big-title devs, and 2k$ is still waaaaay too steep for a "casual" developer ... so I don't get it, but they did it.

What else is new?

Of course the other thing I don't get is all this Sony hate ... jeez, they run over your dog or something? I sure don't love Sony, don't love MS either.

I do think it is really funny how Nintendo is creaming them both with an inexpensive (dare I say "retro?") platform, innovative controllers, games ordinary people like to play, and a fairly nice price.

The PS3 was/is in large measure a stalking horse for Sony's BluRay strategy. Sony appears to have won "that battle," ... but the victory seems phyrric ... no real money in it.

It's BluRay that makes the PS3 expensive, and mostly BluRay that made it late. DigiTimes reported that Sony was getting the current PS3 cells from Chartered Semi for about $45 each. That is not what makes a PS3 pricey.

MS sure hasn't made any ROI from its ventures into gameboxes, basically it's just been soaking the PC franchise to spend money on a losing venture in gaming ... I'm sure that makes the PC gamers pretty pissed.

It's an interesting question of whether Sony or MS might throw in the towel at some point and if so when? Likely it would be whenever the decisions need to be made for "a next generation."

My bet, FWIW, is it will be a LONG time before we see real next-generations of any of these platforms, MS and Sony have both been badly bloodied on ROI and if they are ever to get somewhere need time for amortization. Nintendo's hardware strategy is very conservative and their niche is not very performance sensitive.

The current platforms could be it (other than the usual changes in window-dressing to pretend there's something new) for a long time.

@Jsteel2001 - Higher resolution gaming doesn't necessarily mean that you need to up the poly count on your models. We're still getting a lot of great games that specifically show that you don't need to create high-resolution 3d models to have a good game experience. (see: Pixeljunk titles, echochrome, geometry wars, etc) The xbla and psn markets show that you can get away without spending hours and hours of development time if you have a good concept. Do you really think a PS3 game would take twice as long to develop as a Wii game?

@Stone It depends on the game. You're switching gears in talking about the graphical requirements related to specific concepts rather than the graphical requirements of HD vs. SD gaming. Simple gaming concepts, with minimalistic graphics can be great in either context and do not represent SD or HD as a whole since the minimalist concepts can be coded for platforms we would consider archaic. People are still coding games for the Commodore, afterall.

The same cannot be said of other games. You cannot play BioShock on the Wii. If you stripped out the graphics, and the physics, and used a game engine similar to Metroid Prime, you would not have BioShock. The suggestion that game developers should use low-res geometry and textures, or use a completely different gaming concept, is not a feasible argument.

Thanks, some pretty good reads. Interesting stuff - I would have thought a clever enough compiler would have allowed your XBox code to not be so branchy?

But yeah, each console has its compromises. I guess IBM could have made the 360 CPU OOO, but then that would have driven cost up, something MS wasnt keen for.

Do you think the Cell is worth it for the PS3? I mean, I always thought that the combination of Cell and Blu Ray was the death toll for the PS3 because they both added a lot of unnecessary expense, and in the case of the Cell, made it a lot harder to write code for. Do you think the Cell's power makes it worth all that? (By unnecessary expense with respect to the Cell, I mean, MS gets away with a CPU nowhere near as complicated. More complexity is not always a good solution IMHO)

@BadAndy nice posts. I still have to disagree about Eclipse with you and McMonahan though about Eclipse being bloatware. I have run it on underpowered 1.6 ghz C2Ds and it works just fine. I have 7 large projects open in it all the time simultaneously. I think the only thing I had to do on the slower machine was to stop the automatica builds in Eclipse. Oh and I have a bunch of plugins like m2eclipse, svn, spring ide, etc loaded up in it. Takes around 270 mb disk space and only 256 mb of heap space to keep it going zippy.

Originally posted by spanklez1:I love Sony products and my PS3 but, how retarded are they!? I really want to go up to the big wiggs of Sony and kick them in the junk a few times. Cut the console price already!!!!!!!! I think everyone is asking them to cut the price! Do they sit around in thier offices all day and just think of ways to screw people over. Sure they make alot of money of the ps2 still BUT, eventually all those people are going to want the current gen system. Where are they going to go? Not the PS3 they will buy the Wii or the 360.